You and your kids (mainly you) might sit at home these days playing with your Hobbit Lego set but, perhaps sadly, not enough attention is paid to the more basic bricks who made the brand what it is.

It’s time for their moment in the spotlight. For those about to block… we salute you.

10. Big Blue

(Picture: Lego)

Proof, if proof were needed, that big and blue can be beautiful. The large blue baseplate is 1,024 studs of gorgeousness. Lego say it’s perfect ‘whether you’re constructing an ocean scene or just like the colour blue’, and who are we to argue? Although if you fill it with carefully dispersed small white Lego pieces, you could also have a makeshift tea towel.

9. Mean Green Machine

(Picture: Lego)

If you thought the big blue baseplate was big, take a look at this guy. Okay, so technically the green baseplate is exactly the same size as the blue baseplate, but what it lacks in blueness it more than makes up for in greenness. Forests, football pitches, fields, battlefields, houses… seriously, there’s nothing substantial you can build in Lego land without this bad boy.

8. Little Red

(Picture: Pejman Faratin)

This classic 2×2 brick – or code 300321 to call him by his full name – is a bright little number that can go with every occasion. Building a Lego car and need a makeshift bonnet? He’s your man. Building a Lego car and need a makeshift boot? He is also your man. The Claude Makélélé of Lego bricks – you never quite realise how important he is until you lose him down the back of the sofa.

7. Yellow Brick Road

(Picture: Pejman Faratin)

Look at the bricks, look how they shine for you, and every Lego house you do… and they were all yellow. You simply could not construct a contemporary Lego building in the 1980s without using this particular piece. Long, sleek and alluring, this eight-studded marvel may have lost its bright colour after a few years of being sucked on by baby brothers and sisters, but it never lost its heart. Under-appreciated in its time, perhaps, but now rightly hailed as a Lego legend.

6. Choc-o-block Heaven

(Picture: Pejman Faratin)

Otherwordly, intriguing, brown. There’s nothing in Colossal Legocity quite like the catchily named Brick Ø16 W. Cross. It is simply impossible to build a Lego chimney without him. And two more of him on top of him. He might not have been first in the queue when Lego God was giving out handsome bricks, but you don’t look at the chimney when you’re lighting a Lego fire.

The thinking Lego builder’s brick of choice, you needed this little fellow and dozens of his cousins if you were going to undertake any serious roofing work. He may be blue above, but in grey and black he helped bring hundreds of thousands of Lego castles in kids’ bedrooms across the world to fruition.

4. Suitable. A tyre.

(Picture: Pejman Faratin)

The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Beatles’ first TV appearance. The introduction of the Lego tyre. Yes, 1962 was a pretty big year. Before the swinging 60s, Lego thought you could get by with square wheels on your little Lego cars. It all seems laughable now, when every Lego vehicle from a Police Prisoner Transporter to The Batmobile has a tyre or two.

3. Little Green Brick

(Picture: Pejman Faratin)

I like big bricks and I cannot lie, you other builders may deny… however, sometimes small is better. The classic Angular Brick 1×1 is every Lego builder’s dream, ideal for holding flags on castles and lights on cars…

(Picture: Pejman Faratin)

See?!

2. Black Gold

(Picture: Pejman Faratin)

The beauty of Lego was that you didn’t have to always build things with it. This magnificent flat piece had its uses in the Lego arena, of course, such as providing a vehicle chassis or a pirate ship plank, but perhaps its most effective deployment was as a weapon when you desperately needed to flick something – perhaps a minifig’s chopped-off head – at your little sister. Ahhhh… Lego… so many memories…

1. Red Giant

(Picture: Pejman Faratin)

And now we come… to the greatest Lego brick of them all. Come on, was this ever in doubt? Sometimes, millions of people can be wrong about something at once – you only have to look at the success of bestselling author Dan Brown to see that – but there are fleeting moments when the majority are in the right. The classic eight-studded red 2×4 is the prime example of this. It’s devastatingly simple yet unputdownable, the first Lego brick in the box that we all continue to reach for. It is the brick that makes children cheer and grown men and women cry, a gleaming red champion that just screams ‘Lego’. It might not be the brick you need right now, but it’s the brick that your burgeoning Lego city deserves. A brick that male bricks want to be and female bricks want to be with. It’s a brick that will echo throughout the building ages. Bricking brilliant.

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